This is how chickens come home to roost
The Israel/Palestine issue threatens to splinter the Democratic Party
The phrase “chickens coming home to roost” has been around—in one form or another—for a long time, going back to at least the time Chaucer. And the meaning of the phrase is simple: it used to note when a bad or foolish decision in the past has negative consequences in the present. Perhaps most famously, it was used by Malcolm X in reference to JFK’s assassination, wherein he saw that event as a consequence of the violent culture of the United States:
"[President Kennedy] never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon...Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they always made me glad."—Malcolm X, December 1st, 1963
Most recently—until right now, anyway—it was widely used by many, many people in the media after the January 6th Capitol Riots: what some have argued was no less than an insurrection was a direct consequence of years of Trump’s hateful rhetoric and his catering to the racist elements of the far right:
With this week’s assault on the U.S. Capitol, it is more apparent than ever that the Republican Party has devolved into a coalition based on white grievances. Rather than recognize America’s growing diversity, the GOP welcomed neo-fascists, segregationists, and white nationalists into their ranks.
And now, the Party’s chickens have come home to roost.
And then there was the case of President Obama’s preacher, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, using the phrase in reference to 9/11, arguing that the death and destruction on September 11th, 2001 was a case of the United States getting what it deserved for it’s imperialism around the world:
“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye ... and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.”—Rev. Jeremiah Wright, September 16th, 2001
It’s easy to be outraged by these sorts of statements, to argue that they go too far, especially the first and last, wherein the assassination of a President and the deaths of thousands of innocents are almost being applauded, by Malcolm X and Reverend Wright, respectively. Still, there is a way to see these statements as justifiable with respect to the ideology being served. Someone looking at the world through the appropriate lens might very well agree with Malcolm X, Reverend Wright, and Marlon Weems (the writer of the Newsbreak piece).
Honestly, I kind of agree with Weems, insofar as I do think the Republican Party has been doing a piss-poor job of housekeeping, of late. It has failed to exorcise some of the worst sorts of people from its ranks, most of whom are Trump-happy ass-clowns. The idiot pillow guy comes to mind, along with a sitting congressperson, one Marjorie Taylor Greene. These clowns are dragging the whole Party down, party because they have thousands and thousands of idiotic supporters who never shut up.
And my agreement with Weems in this respect leads me right into my own “chickens coming home to roost” argument. Across the last ten years or so, the Democratic Party has catered to what are—numbers-wise—fringe movements that purport to represent quite specific and limited marginalized groups, movements that nonetheless seek significant structural changes in society-at-large to appease these groups. And these movements have more or less coalesced into an ultra-progressivism, consistently championed by younger Democrats in office like “The Squad,” and their legions of supporters on social media and in the professional media.
As far as an election strategy, I guess I’d have to allow that it’s kind of worked, since the Democrats now control congress and the Presidency. And while the leaders in Congress are traditional liberals, it’s pretty clear that the more progressive elements are driving a lot of policy. And President Biden, once one of the chief moderates of the Democratic Party, appears to be okay with this. To a point.
That point became apparent this last week as violence in the Middle East—Israel and Palestine—exploded onto the front page of media-land, eventually even muscling out stories on Liz Cheney (the media’s obsession with her is proof-positive of it’s current bias, I think). Biden, Pelosi, and other long-term Democrats (especially those in districts with significant numbers of Jewish voters) were quick to offer support to Israel, even if slightly qualified. But the other side of the Democrats, the progressive side led by The Squad, well they weren’t on the same page at all:
“We oppose our money going to fund militarized policing, occupation and systems of violent oppression and trauma,” Representative Cori Bush of Missouri, a Black Lives Matter activist now in her first term in Congress, said in her own floor speech on Thursday. “Until all our children are safe, we will continue to fight for our rights in Palestine and in Ferguson.”
Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, a Palestinian-American from Detroit, referred to herself as “a reminder to colleagues that Palestinians do indeed exist, that we are human,” before condemning “Israel’s apartheid government” from the House floor.
Also:
Less than 24 hours later, on Friday, nearly 150 prominent liberal advocacy organizations issued a joint statement calling for “solidarity with the Palestinian residents” and condemning “Israeli state violence” and “supremacy” in Jerusalem.
The statement was signed not just by groups focused on Middle Eastern and Jewish issues but by groups dedicated to causes like climate change, immigration, feminism and racial justice — a sign that for the party’s liberal faction, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has moved far beyond the realm of foreign policy.
“The base of the party is moving in a very different direction than where the party establishment is,” Mr. Zogby said. “If you support Black Lives Matter, it was not a difficult leap to saying Palestinian lives matter, too.”
Here’s the joint statement the NYT piece is referring to. I don’t know how “prominent” some of those organizations actually are, frankly, but then one of the issues with current Democratic Party is that if an org says it represents a supposedly marginalized group, the Party tends to just accept it as legitimate. But beyond this letter, there is also Congresswoman Marie Newman’s letter to the administration, signed by 24 other members of Congress (it’s on twitter, of course):
The other signatories:
I have no doubt that many of the people who are pro-Palestine are quite sincere and believe that they are standing up for the downtrodden. Many of them, however, are just Antisemitic, and their hateful ideology is getting cover when it should be exposed. And it’s getting that cover from the permissiveness of this new, uber-woke progressivism, wherein there are two purity tests: 1) being able to claim membership in one marginalized group or another and 2) hating all things Trump. Thus, someone who once would have been described as a “neocon war-monger” by the progressive left is somehow now praised by the same , simply because she (I’m talking about Liz Cheney) is a she and because she hates all things Trump. Pretty much anything else is forgivable, if one can pass those two tests. Someone who is a straight white male can even get around the first test by openly hating themselves. But the second test is straight up pass or fail.
And this ignorant approach to political ideology, an approach that allows authoritarian Middle-Eastern states with policies that treat women and non-Muslims as second or third class citizens to pretend that their leadership cares about human rights simply because they’re pro-Palestine (even though anyone with a clue knows that they’re Antisemitic), an approach that conflates climate change with black lives matter with abortion rights with Palestinian statehood with LBGT rights, well it’s a real case of chickens coming home to roost, or at least it will be in 2022. And maybe it’s no coincidence that Antisemitism is a root cause, given the views of Malcom X and Reverend Wright in this regard. Because that’s a chicken that’s been a long time coming for the modern Democratic Party.